Tektronix' new DPO70000 digital phosphor oscilloscope (DPO) and DSA70000 digital serial analyser (DSA) products extend the company's realtime DPO performance platform recently introduced with its DPO7000 model. Included with the new series is key high-end functionality found previously only on its TDS6000C, which is claimed to be the world's fastest multichannel realtime oscilloscope.

These new 4 GHz, 6 GHz, and 8 GHz instruments provide industry-leading data acquisition, debug, validation, and compliance testing, to provide engineers with an ideal test platform for their high-speed designs.

The DPO70000 series provides broad capabilities and performance for engineers who need to efficiently and confidently debug and verify high-speed digital designs in a wide range of industries and applications, says Tektronix. The DSA70000 series is optimised for the serial data designer, providing a test platform for high-speed standards including PCI-Express, XAUI, FB-DIMM, and Serial ATA.

The electronics industry increasingly depends upon industry standards for communications systems and computer buses. Design engineers working with high-speed serial and high-speed digital applications such as ASICs, SerDes, memory, motherboards, add-in cards, and peripherals in the computer, communications and consumer industries need the ability to validate signal integrity and view multiple channels simultaneously with matched channel response, to rapidly discover and capture intermittent faults or events in complex, often multilane signal structures. Troubleshooting serial data faults often requires detecting serial data protocol errors and tracing them to the underlying electrical phenomenon, requiring the ability to capture, view and analyse signal behaviours and their effects in both the physical and data link layers.

"Designers need to work with a growing number of serial standards, greater complexity, and with critical signal integrity challenges," said Colin Shepard, vice president, Performance Oscilloscopes, Tektronix. "Along with the outstanding features and performance of the DSA70000 hardware, the new analysers provide extremely accurate timing and jitter measurements, high-speed serial triggering and protocol decode, and compliance testing for serial data standards. The DSA70000 marries the most comprehensive serial data debug and analysis functionality with the industry's most advanced oscilloscope hardware platform."

Leading realtime performance

The DPO70000 and DSA70000 are based upon a new generation hardware platform that the company says eliminates the trade-offs found in other high-performance oscilloscopes among sample rate, record length and waveform capture rate. The 4 GHz DPO70404, 6 GHz DPO70604, and 8 GHz DPO70804 provide the bandwidth and performance to meet the needs for a broad range of high-speed digital design applications - sample rate is 25 GS/s on all four channels simultaneously. They have a 12,1" XGA display.

The DPO70804 and DSA70804 have a rise time to 35 ps (typical) and will provide a jitter noise floor down to 400 fs rms (typical) for critical jitter measurements. Each DPO70000 model includes 10 M memory standard per channel while the DSA70000 provides 20 M standard per channel. Both support configurations up to 100 M memory per channel.

All of the new models provide fast waveform capture at all sample rates through fourth generation DPX signal imaging that can acquire more than 250 000 waveforms per second. This allows designers to capture, view, and measure dynamic signal information in realtime much more quickly and easily. All models also include the company's unique Pinpoint trigger system, a complete A/B triggering system that helps rapidly discover and capture intermittent faults or events in complex signal structures.